In the past decade the use of digital audio and video has emerged because of its usefulness in the recording, manipulation, mass-production, and distribution of audio or video data. The distribution of music across the internet through on-line stores or file-sharing sites may depend on digital recording and digital compression algorithms but in the main distribution of audio or video as data files (digital files) rather than as physical objects has significantly reduced costs of distribution.
Commensurate with the development of digital audio (which will be understood herein to refer to any type of digital media file, including digital audio or digital video files) has been a reduction in the cost of storage. The decline in the cost of storage coupled with the increase in the prevalence of digital audio technology has led to users having large digital music or movie collections on their home computers. These large individual digital collections have led to the development of systems and methods to assist users in the management of these collections.
In particular, certain of these organizational systems may attempt to identify and catalogue, or otherwise organize, digital audio files which are resident on a user's computer such that a user can access such a system to browse, organize, access or otherwise manage their digital music collection utilizing an interface provided by such a system. Thus, to improve a user experience, it is desired that such systems can substantially automatically identify both the song and artist or an associated album for digital audio files stored at the user's computers such that these songs, artists or albums may be utilized to manage the user's collection.
As the tastes of users may be quite diverse and users' collections may include digital audio files which they created or are not widely distributed, this task may not be straightforward. While most digital audio files contain metadata that identify the song and artist, many files are missing these tags, or have errors of several varieties: misspellings, mis-identifications, or just useless information (e.g., “Track 06” as a song name). Hence, it is desired to substantially automatically identify digital audio files without relying solely on such metadata.
One method for identifying digital audio files is to utilize a reference database of known digital audio files such that a digital audio file of a user may be associated with one of the known digital audio files and the artist, song or album information associated with the known audio file may be associated with that digital audio file of the user. This type of reference database may be difficult to come by and, for a variety of reasons including the addition of new files, it can almost be assured that such a reference database will not include certain digital audio files. Additionally, in many cases users may be charged for the use of such databases.
What is desired then, are systems and method for the identification of digital files using an evolving database, where the database can be iteratively refined in conjunction with the addition of new users or the processing of new digital files.